Listening permeates everything students do in the classroom and is the most used literacy skill in school, no matter the grade level (elementary, middle, high school, and college). Researchers have investigated listening pedagogy for almost 100 years and have all reported that when listening habits are addressed in the classroom they can improve students' performance, and yet listening is still not taught in the same way that reading, writing, or even speaking are addressed in a classroom. There are some challenges to why it hasn't been given its due and is often referred to as the “Cinderella Skill.” It is essential to acknowledge that assessing listening will always involve some level of complexity due to its intrinsic nature as a mental process.
TopIntroduction
Let’s start with a fun fact to use with peers or students. Did you know that the word ‘listen’ contains the same exact letters as the word silent?’ If you write the letters randomly on the board and have students (or adults) try to make a word - they most likely will always come up with the word listen. If you then ask them to rearrange the letters and make a new word, very few of them quickly come up with the word silent. Try it and see. It is sometimes hard to rethink a new word once we have focused on one way of doing things. Sometimes we have to revisit ideas we have held onto and release them into the atmosphere so we can look at things from a new perspective.
It is true that most people really do just listen with the intent to reply; not to understand. This is our personal experience with listening. It is how we listen to others and they listen to us. We listen for what we know and what we want to know. Words that are said that are familiar or connect to similar experiences make us want to interject and share our own familiar life experiences. This is how listening was modeled for each of us. We listened to the words that our families said and learned to speak. It was our early listening learning experience. When youngsters are learning to listen in a home environment, it is very different from listening in a school with lots of people all vying to speak and be heard. “Successful academic conversations begin with listening” (Wilson, 2015, p. 4). Helping students transition from listening to replying to listening to understanding is the challenge teachers face in their classrooms.
Listening is part of everything we do in our lives. We listen to the alarm clock to awaken us in the morning. We listen for our phones to ring and for the voices of our friends and family. Students listen for bells to ring to start school or for the teacher to start class. It is a part of our daily lives and we routinely take for granted – our ability to listen. But hearing is different from listening in that hearing is a passive activity that doesn’t require us to respond, whereas listening requires our full attention and our focus to try and understand and interpret the information from the speaker or source (Truesdale, 1990).
The absence of mindful listening habits must be addressed in the field of education in order to prepare our students better to be effective listeners and communicators, as well as to become truly empathetic to one another. “What makes someone a good listener? Goodwill, a willingness to take the time, the ability to focus and avoid distraction, some concern to understand, a working memory.” (Beatty, 1999, p. 281).
Mindful listening requires practice and strategic and purposeful planning. Researchers have been suggesting the need for listening instruction to be included in the school curriculum since Paul Rankin’s study in 1928. “The present emphasis on the four language arts in the school, as measured by the relative time allotments, is inversely proportional to the frequency of their use in life” (Rankin, 1928, p. 630). Thirty years later, Ralph Nichols provided evidence of the need for children to gain listening capacities in the 1950s. Still, in today’s schools, we only address the need for listening in terms of telling students to listen to or for information. This is why we have written this book. It is high time that schools begin teaching students to listen – further, to mindfully listen – not just tell children to listen. Almost 100 years later and we still haven’t included listening instruction as part of literacy development in elementary classrooms. Is it possible that listening could be a magic link that literacy instruction has been missing, and that for this reason, rates of illiteracy in reading have not significantly changed in these past 100 years? Of course, it is possible.
(It is also possible that the pine bark beetle has had an almost imperceptible but powerful impact on the quality of the paper that books are printed upon such that text is slightly more difficult to read on paper … and that literacy simply can’t improve because of it. But what is more likely?)